Huawei Honor 6X Review

Huawei Honor 6X Price in India

The Honor 6X is a well built device featuring one of the best cameras we have seen in the budget segment.

Huawei Honor 6X Rating 72100100

Our Verdict

The Honor 6X is a well built and reliable smartphone. It has reasonably long battery life and is decent in terms of speed. Couple that with a great camera and you have a phone worth considering. It isn’t as fast as the Coolpad Cool 1, but can work as an able replacement if it is priced under Rs. 15,000.

PROS

Well built
Really good camera
Day's worth of battery life

CONS

Performance could have been better

Huawei Honor 6X: Detailed Review

Huawei is making a habit out of using dual-cameras on its smartphones. The Honor 6 Plus was the first time we really saw dual-cameras being put to good use in phone. That was followed by the impressive Huawei P9, and then the Honor 8. It seems the company is ready to bring its dual-camera game to the budget segment. Granted that the Coolpad Cool 1 is first to the party in India, and the Nubia Z11 Mini is still our favourite budget camera phone, the Honor 6X stands to make an impression at the very least. Is it good enough? Here’s our in-depth review of the Honor 6X.

Camera: Betting big on dual cameras
Huawei has been persistent with dual-camera setups, with a dual-camera smartphone for all prices now. Like the P9 and Honor 8, the Honor 6X’s camera is also quite good for the price. In fact, it seems comparable to the imaging standard set by the Nubia Z11 Mini.

The phone uses a 12MP + 2MP setup, of which the 12MP sensor is the primary camera and the 2MP sensor adds details like depth of field and contrast data. Colours are vibrant, although colour tones appear slightly off the mark because of spiked saturation levels. The saturation levels are consistently warmer across most colour temperatures, although Honor does well to automatically detect and adjust white balance as per the ambience you shoot in. In comparison, the Coolpad Cool 1 renders noticeably flatter tones than the Honor 6X. The Honor 6X also captures decent details and sharpness, and produces distinct background defocus, which is good for a phone of this price. The Honor 6X also offers reasonably fast shutter response, despite the noticeable lag between hitting the shutter button and the image being saved.

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The dual-camera setup has a bokeh mode, and like the Cool 1, blurred backgrounds are produced by software and not optics. It still looks fairly decent. The Honor 6X is a decent smartphone camera for shooting portraits. There are multiple filters, shooting modes like Pro mode for manual controls, Light Painting for long exposure, and Beauty for simple shots with enhanced skin tones.

However, 1080p video recording is not smooth, segments appear choppy and there are notable stutters. This may possibly be an effect of the processor’s lack of power, along with the app itself. It cannot record 4K video either.

Performance: Not the best
While the camera is almost excellent for a phone at this price, performance is just about fine. The SoC in question here is the Kirin 655, which is the successor to the Kirin 650 used on the Honor 5C. It has the same octa core setup as the Kirin 650, with two clusters of Cortex A-53 cores, but with a slight bump in speed. To be exact the clock speed has been increased from 2.0GHz on one quad-core cluster to 2.1GHz. As for the GPU, the Kirin 655 uses the same Mali T-830 MP2 GPU as the Kirin 650.

The small bump in CPU speed has made the phone slightly faster than the Honor 5C. The performance is still isn't as smooth as the Coolpad Cool 1 or even the Qualcomm Snapdragon 650-powered Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. That said, this phone is a fine example of why we do not judge performance by synthetic benchmarks alone.

Apps such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Gmail, Calendar, or Instagram work quite well and basic users will have no issue with the device. It is only when you have more than a dozen apps running in the background that the phone feels a little sluggish. Minor stutters are also visible when jumping between apps and while gaming, but that’s about it. The Honor 6X doesn’t generate a lot of heat either, hitting max temperatures of 37-38 degree celsius while gaming or recording video.

Call quality is good, and voice sounds clear at both ends. The Honor 6X maintained good reception in parking lots, and while travelling. On the other hand, the audio quality is below average for music playback, from the integrated single speaker. It is not loud, and the volume output is low through earphones as well. However, the sound is well-textured, and is close to audio source. It sounds well-balanced and tight, and works if you are okay with the low volume output.

Build and Design: Sturdy and likeable design
Like most budget devices out there, the Honor 6X also has a metallic back with a curved glass front. Although, it is a bit more ergonomic than many other 5.5-inch devices, thanks to its curved back. The phone feels nice and sturdy to hold, although the metal is still too slippery to be used in one hand.

There are two plastic strips on the top and bottom of the back, presumably for better reception. Huawei has done a good job of giving them a metallic finish, making them feel similar to the rest of the back. The two physical buttons are well placed and tactile. In addition, the phone comes with a pre-fitted tempered glass screen protector. The dual-camera module protrudes on the back, which some may not like.

Good display and a workable UI
Complementing the build quality is a beautiful 5.5-inch screen, which uses an IPS LCD panel with 1920 x 1080p resolution. Out of the box, the display is sharp, has good colour reproduction and is calibrated to be slightly warm, which will suit a majority of users. Although, if you don’t like it, there is a custom colour temperature setting in the menu that allows more control over the colour tone.

Moreover, there is a blue light filter toggle or a night mode within the settings as well, which is very helpful for people like me, who like to read on their phones. This decreases the intensity of the blue light, giving the display a yellowish tone, which makes it easier to read under dim lights.

The only complaint I have with the display is that it’s really reflective and almost illegible under direct sunlight. Maximum recorded luminescence of 660 lux works indoors, but the display doesn’t seem to handle outdoor conditions very well.

The Honor 6X runs on EMUI v4.1, which is Honor’s custom interface, layered over Android 6.0 Marshmallow. This is the same version we saw on the Honor 5C and while it looks nice and is relatively smooth, it is heavy. That said, it does not hinder performance of the device. EMUI also features some custom apps like health, themes, phone manager and even a customer service app called HiCare, to make your user experience better. Now, whether you would use them or not is totally up to you and yes you can uninstall most of these apps.

Battery Life: Dependable
Powering the entire setup is a 3340mAh non-removable battery that does an excellent job of keeping the phone running throughout the day. The Kirin 655 is frugal in terms of power consumption and and drains the most battery only during intensive tasks, like gaming.

This means, if you are a light user then you won’t have to charge your phone until you go to bed, if you start the day with a completely charged phone. That's about 12 hours worth of battery life per day.

In fact, with about half an hour of gaming per day, the Honor 6X still gutted it out all day. The phone scores 5 hours of and 49 minutes on the PCMark battery test, which is still lower compared to the Coolpad Cool 1 and considerably lower than the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, but still good enough.

Bottomline
The Honor 6X is a well built device featuring one of the best cameras we have seen in the budget segment. It is relatively smooth and offers a day’s worth of battery life, making it one of the few budget phones that balances out all the necessary features. The Coolpad Cool 1 is definitely a better performer, but the Honor 6X is an able replacement for it. However, Huawei will have to choose the right price. At around 13-15k, the Honor 6X should be good value for money.

Note: The Honor 6X is not yet launched in India. The company announced the device at CES 2017 today, at $250 (approx. Rs. 17000)